Since the beginning of this century, Muslims all around the planet have
pondered on the nature of Islamic culture and the challenges of modern values to Muslim
institutions and material life. Seven developments since the fifteenth century, when
Europe broke the Muslim monopoly of global trade, have contributed to this state of
affairs. These developments will be identified and discussed in the sections below. They
are the causes and consequences of certain historical and political changes in the lives
and cultures of Muslim peoples around the world. An analysis of this total of seven
developments would help us understand the continuities and discontinuities in the Muslim
world.

The purpose of this paper is threefold. The first objective is to identify
the factors and forces responsible for continuity and discontinuity in Muslim opinions on,
and attitudes toward, cultural diversity. Working on the assumption that the Muslim world
managed to maintain its cultural integrity while assimilating peoples from different
cultural and civilizational backgrounds in the Middle East and beyond, and considering the
symbolic and substantive mechanisms that Islam and Muslim peoples created to keep their ummah
united and assertive in world affairs, this paper argues that the expansion of Europe and
the colonization of the Americas contributed to cultural continuities and discontinuities
in Muslim societies and cultures. The second objective of this paper is to show how and
why the European conquest and colonization of Muslim lands created the cultural and
philosophical transformations that led to the enthronement of nationalist ideas among
Muslims. The third objective is to draw several conclusions based upon my findings on the
impact of the seven developments identified as crucial in the making of the crisis of
cultural alienation in Muslim lands.

Seven Major Developments Changing the Muslim Cultural Landscape

The first development was what Western historians called the Age of
Discovery. It was an age of discovery for the Westerners when it comes to the lands of the
Native Americans. It was also an age of discovery for them because, since the travels of
Marco Polo, not much was known about China and the lands in that part of the world.
However, for Muslims, the lands bordering the Indian and Pacific oceans were not
completely unknown to them. India and China, the two principal civilizations bordering
these two major oceans of the world, were known to the Muslims and their traders, and a
brisk trade in a wide range of goods and services was already established. Muslim traders,
accompanied by their Jewish counterparts, were in operation in these parts of the world
long before Columbus sailed for the Americas and Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama headed
for India by way of the Cape of Good Hope.

The second development that has contributed to the present Muslim efforts
at cultural adjustment to the challenges of modernity was the industrial revolution and
the new strength it gave to European powers. The long duel between the two Abrahamic
civilizations on the Mediterranean Sea was raised to a new level. Since the late
eighteenth century when the British pioneered the industrial revolution, the Muslims have
come to see a Europe strengthened by their new genie in metallic powers. This industrial
revolution has since then changed the power equation between Europeans and other peoples
of the world. With industrial might, Europe gradually transformed its values, its material
bases of living, and its institutions. The word "factory," which was known in
Muslim lands and whose English equivalent derived from Italians influenced by Muslims in
the medieval period, became a common feature of industrializing Europe and America. The
bank, another institution whose most powerful instrument of exchange, the check, was
another Muslim invention, was taken to higher levels of utility and performance by the
Europeans and later the Americans. The word "bank," whose roots go back to the
Italian Banco (bench), was again borrowed from the Muslim experience. However, from
our perspective, the institution of banking would later evolve far better than expected of
Mudaraba and Musaraka (profit-sharing and loss-sharing idea of the Muslims who have
historically been allergic to riba (usurious interest)).

The third development that has also affected the nature of the Muslim
world and the modern Euro-American world was the European colonization of the Muslim lands
in the nineteenth century. The industrial success of the European nations enabled them to
extend their powers beyond their immediate geographic neighborhood. The growing rivalry
between them and the growing planetary market emerging before their eyes propelled the
strongest among them to seek territories elsewhere. What I am arguing here is that the Age
of Discovery of Vasco da Gama created the conditions for the European colonization of the
world. The colonization and peopling of the Americas preceded the colonization and
settlement of lands east of the Americas. The present state of the Muslims around the
world cannot be understood by an alien anthropologist from another galaxy if he or she
does not know that, long before the industrial revolution, the European countries of Spain
and Portugal led the other European nations in the exploration of western and eastern
lands of the planet. European hegemony did not only lead to the colonization of Muslim
lands, but it also changed the demography of many lands through the transplantation of
peoples from one region to the other. Examples of such transplantation are the following:
Chinese in Southeast Asian states of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines;
Indians in the East African coastal states; French men and women in North Africa;
Europeans in Southern Africa; Indians and Chinese in the Caribbean territories; and white
peoples in Australia and New Zealand. This is only the report card on Western European
colonization. The Russian conquest and colonization of central Asia is usually overlooked
by anti-colonial and anti-imperial nationalists of the Third World. Recent developments in
central Asia have brought this home to us after the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

The fourth development that has also affected the Muslim understanding of
cultural diversity is the transplantation of nationalist ideas and their acceptance by
Muslim intellectuals and their political leaders. This intellectual current has changed
the Muslim self-concept. Not only have Muslims given greater prominence to territorial and
geohistorical particularities, but they have also come to embrace a new political
mythology that goes against their religious universalism. These psychological and
psycho-political transformations are the intended or unintended consequences of their
flirtation with borrowed European theories of nationalism.

The fifth development in this century that has also affected continuities
and discontinuities in Muslim life and thought was the rise of communism and the
establishment of the Soviet state in Russia and eastern Europe after the Second World War.
Judging events from the perspective of the post-Cold War era might be distorting the real
nature of things in the Muslim world early in this century. In retrospect, we can argue
here that the emergence of Marxist thought as a major contender of human allegiance was
seen by Muslim intellectuals as one other alien demon to fight and keep away from the
mental and physical spaces of Muslim peoples. The legacies of communism in the Arab world
and in central Asia certainly remind us that the problem of cultural continuities and
discontinuities will remain a challenge to Muslim leaders and the led for sometime in the
future.

The sixth development that has again contributed to the state of affairs
in the Muslim world was the eruption of the Iranian revolution under Khomeini and its
reverberating effects throughout the Muslim world and beyond. This revolution, which has
produced many images and stereotypes of the Muslim peoples of the world, has contributed
positively and negatively to the problem of continuities and discontinuities in Muslim
landsmore on this phenomenon later.

The seventh and last development to be considered here is the collapse of
the former Soviet Union and the present state of Euro-American hegemony in both the
military and cultural life of modern human beings. This state of affairs has consequences
not only for Muslims but for all peoples who see themselves as different from the
Euro-American peoples whose values, institutions, and material way of life are believed to
be really or imaginably different from their own. This state of affairs is again the
product of a series of historical and global developments dating from the historical
periods identified above. The globalization of the Western way of life has created new
opportunities and new challenges to Muslims, especially their younger generation, to
assimilate Western ideas, values, and material goods. With the end of the Cold War comes
the reign of Western materialism and consumerism. This new global phenomenon has been
characterized as the "McDonalization" of the world. An American cultural
commentator has written a book, growing out of his seminal paper published some years ago
in the Atlantic Monthly, describing the post-Cold War era as that of a contest
between "Jihad and McWorld."

The Age of Discovery & Cultural Challenges to Muslim Societies

Students of world cultures cannot deny the impact of the West on human
societies over the last five hundred years. Evidence for the impact of the West is visible
in the history and demography of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and the many
islands settled by persons of European descent in the last five centuries. In writing
about cultural continuities and discontinuities in Muslim lands, one must raise the
question: What has been the legacy of the Muslim encounter with the West? Many books and
essays have been written by Muslims and non-Muslims on this encounter. Here we are not
reinventing the wheel; rather, we are trying to identify factors and forces responsible
for the changing perspectives in Muslim self-definition and in Muslim opinions on, and
attitudes towards, certain aspects of European and Euro-American cultural norms and
patterns of behavior.

Three issues of importance to Westerners and Muslims resulted from the
encounter following the Age of Discovery. The first issue deals with the definition of the
human being and the divergent attitudes between the Muslim slave owners and the Spaniards
in the Americas. When the Europeans encountered the native peoples of the Americas, their
conceptual screens did not register the humanity of these peoples. Not only did they
eliminate their cultures but [also] their very humanity was questioned and ended. This is
the legacy of the Spanish conquistadores. The Catholic father, Las Casas, is
usually credited for changing the tide of fortune for the "American Indians."
His intervention, according to the historical sources, helped save the lives of those
native peoples who had not fallen to the swords of the conquering Spaniards. Why is this
genocidal event used for this discussion of Muslim perspectives on cultural diversity?
Well, the fact that the Spaniards questioned the humanity of the native peoples of the
Americas suggests that, for the Spaniards, the natives had no soul, and, for this and
other related reasons, they could be killed without any feeling of guilt. This act, which
was unknown to their Muslim contemporaries, would have been deemed reprehensible.

Muslim rejection of such a policy and plan of action cannot be learned
because not much was written about Muslim opinions on, and attitudes toward, the American
slave trade, although literature on Muslim slaves in the Americas does exist. From the
limited sample opinions of Muslim slave narratives and of practical diplomacy of Muslim
rulers such as the Sultan of Morocco, who intervened in the liberation of one Abdurrahman
ibn Sori, an African prince from the Fula kingdom of Futa Jallon who spent about forty
years in slavery in Natchez, Mississippi, we can say that Muslims did not conflate race,
color, and creed into one metaphysical criterion by which some are elected and others are
damned. But if the Muslim contemporaries did not know much about the exploits of the
Spaniards in the Americas, they saw the negative consequences of the fall of Grenada. Not
only were Muslims booted out of the Iberian Peninsula in large numbers, but Jews and
wavering Christians were also ejected forcefully and mercilessly by the victorious
crusaders and the leaders of the Inquisition. Evidence for this claim is plentiful in the
historical record. Our task here is not to engage in any finger pointing exercise; rather,
in this section of the paper, we focus our attention on how the Age of Discovery affected
Muslim views of cultural diversity.

As argued above, though the Muslims in the East did not know fully what
was happening in the Americas, there is overwhelming material evidence pointing to Muslim
reactions to the persecution of Muslims and Jews by the triumphant Spaniards under
Ferdinand and Isabella. This differing view of diversity, that was best illustrated by the
Inquisition in Spain and elsewhere in Christian lands of these times, was best represented
by the different treatment the Turks gave to the Jews at this critical moment in their
history. During this horrible period of persecution, the Church fathers and their agents
took the lives of fellow human beings simply because they did not toe the theological
lines of the day. It is true that slavery existed in Muslim lands during the same period,
but there is no historical record to suggest that people should be discriminated both on
racial and religious grounds. This conflation of race, color, and creed in the
categorization of human beings is the result of the Age of Discovery.

The second issue that grew out of the Age of Discovery was the
commodification of human beings and of human relations. In a worldview in which man is
racially and theologically defined, chances are those who did not fit this metaphysical
Procrustean bed became the objects of derision and exploitation. If the individual victim
was not put to the sword, chances are his life was reduced to that of the hewer of wood
and the drawer of water. This racialization, sectarianization, and commodification of life
led to the creation of a caste system that paralleled the Aryan-imposed order in India,
where the Sudrahs (untouchables) willingly or reluctantly accepted their position in light
of Hindu metaphysics. The Spanish conquest of the New World wittingly or unwittingly set
the stage for the emergence of such a system.

Muslim societies, who were increasingly affected by their contacts with
the defenders of this new dispensation, gradually and sometimes unconsciously found their
peoples abandoning the old paradigm of their geographers and their men of learning. Let us
illustrate this point by referring to the Muslim sources. We know that during the height
of Muslim power and glory, especially in the Ummayyad and Abbassid periods, the Muslim
geographers such as al-Masudi divided the world so that the Arab Muslim was at the center
of creation. This unislamic ethnocenthicism, wrapped in the riddle of secular
anthropocentricism, was further complicated by the Ptolemaic astronomy of geocentricism.
Such a conception of human diversity and the ranking of cultural men and women were more
reflective of the Greek aversion to the barbarian and of the Hebrew contempt of the goyim.
But while acknowledging these realities of the different civilizations and cultures, one
must also add that all these different philosophies of man speak of human dignity and
equality at the highest levels of abstraction in their metaphysics. Based on this
historical fact, one can state here that the Age of Discovery did not only lead Spaniards
and others in Europe to see themselves as different from the "natives" of the
world, but it also inspired them to create the world in their own image and to smash the
mirrors of the other cultures so that, from now on, they would not and could no longer see
themselves in their own terms. This cultural conquest that took its greatest toll in the
Americas would later manifest itself in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. As a result,
many peoples from various parts of the world would be scattered in areas that were not
their original homelands. The term "diaspora," which was originally
reserved for the Hebrew people who had left Palestine following the destruction of
Jerusalem by the Roman general Titus in 70 A.D., was gradually extended to other ethnic
and religious minorities who over time migrated from one point on the planet to another.

The Age of Discovery played an important part in this global
transformation. The term America can be, and has been, a metaphor for many thingsone
thing that this term can conjure up is the massive relocation of human beings from the old
cultures to a new culture of pluralism. In this context, what the Islamic historical
records suggest is that military and political defeat of ones foes should not
justify the denial of humanity to the vanquished, even if the subjugated refused to
embrace the religion of the conquerors. Even though Muslims were affected by the Age of
Discovery, their societies did not pattern themselves after the racial and religious
antagonism that increasingly characterized a triumphant Europe extending its might beyond
the seas.

The third issue that developed out of the Age of Discovery was the gradual
secularization of the world. The pursuit of gold and the mercantile culture that dominated
the Europeans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries together created a world of
competition and monopoly. As evident from the economic history of the period, the race for
gold among these European powers gradually led to the widening of the gaps between the
classes of Europe. This class separation and the culture of indifference that feeds on it
would later lead to the political revolutions of the eighteenth century. How did these
developments in Europe and the Americas affect the Muslims in their understanding of
economic inequalities in human societies? Well, the evidence available to us suggests
that, though serious economic disparities existed in certain parts of the Muslim world
during this time, there is a body of literature which teaches Muslims not to use wealth as
a marker separating one human being from the other. In this sense, one can argue that,
though Muslim states and societies were gradually losing ground to the emerging
Euro-American hegemony, their peoples were not rigidly divided by class culture as it was
in Europe. To put this point in another way, one can say that the political economy of the
Muslim world did not support an urban society where structural and functional
differentiations were changing the relationship between man and man. Furthermore, the
Muslim intellectuals and thinkers of this period did not come up with similar or parallel
thoughts that portray economic success in this world as evidence of Divine grace on
humankind. This Puritan notion of worldly success was not a part of the mental furniture
of the Muslim world. As a result, material accumulation as a marker between the
economically and theologically favored and economically and theologically unfavored
[never] entered the Muslim consciousness.

The Industrial Revolution & Muslim Understanding of Diversity

Students of the industrial revolution have identified many changes that
this human invention caused in the way we view our world, in the way we relate to our
world, and in the way we manage and organize time in the workplace and elsewhere in our
social universe. Philosophers of history and science may disagree as to the true nature of
this revolution and its implications for both Western and non-Western societies. However,
for our present purpose here, we are trying to understand how this major development in
the human condition affected the Muslim view of diversity. Conceptually, the industrial
revolution impacted European society first and later elsewhere in countless ways. First,
it took the factory idea, which was already known to Muslims and to others along the
Mediterranean, to new heights. Not only did this revolution redefine the relationship
between man and man, but it also helped redefine the relationship between Man and his
Machine. Homo Faber was no longer a single entity in the universe of creation; rather, he
has become a part of a system of management and production whose processes we could relate
to but increasingly had no control over from day to day. This new role of Homo Faber
created a new class in human society. Whereas, in the agrarian world, all men could till
the soil and grow food for their sustenance and, if necessary, barter or sell the balance
of production for profit, the industrial revolution changed all that. From now on, those
who control capital and own factories decide who is employable and how much one employee
gets as opposed to others in this new hierarchy of workers in the factory. This factory
culture, which was developing within an urban milieu first in England and later elsewhere
in Europe and beyond, altered the nature of the old relationship between man and man. It
also created a new relationship between Man and his tools. The potential sense of
alienation of the worker from his new working environment then has been captured in the
literature on the luddites and their destructive attitudes towards the inanimate objects
directly and indirectly competing with them for managerial attention and accountability.

In retrospect, one can ask, how did this emerging industrial culture
affect the Muslim peoples? And in what manner did it affect the Muslim understanding of
diversity? Answers to this and other related questions can be provided by the historical
record on the labor movements in the Muslim world. Four points deserve our attention here.
The first relates to the nature of culture in Muslim societies and the manner in which
Muslim leaders and the led reacted to the growing industrial challenges of the Western
European peoples. If we define culture as a human enterprise that is best characterized by
three important componentsthe material base, the value base, and the institutional
basethen we can say that in Muslim societies the industrial revolution would affect
three dimensions of cultural life. The immediate reaction of Muslim societies to the
industrial revolution was in the field of military science. Taking note of the immediate
impact of the industrial revolution on the power balance between nations and peoples, and
determined to maintain themselves at all costs, the most powerful Muslim empires, Ottoman
and others, tried to secure the magical powers of the Europeans. This quest for military
power through the genie of industrial transformation impacted powerfully the Ottoman drive
to modernize and Westernize simultaneously. The literature is rich on this point. What we
do know is that the leaders of the Ottoman empire belatedly realized that Europe was
breaking away from the human pack on the path to material development, and that Muslims
and other non-European peoples could only catch up by getting the scientific and
technological knowledge of Europe. To transform themselves to meet the demands of the new
dispensation, the leaders of the Muslim world, especially the Ottoman, began to get the
knowledge, buy the technology or purchase the services of European technicians. This
attempt to get science and technology from Europe created a new cultural presence for
Europeans. Not only were these Europeans received as traders and travelers, but
increasingly they were brought in as technical experts. Their presence and the prestige
accorded them by the Muslim rulers would gradually create a psychocultural phenomenon of
xenophobia. This state of affairs was not universally evident in all Muslim lands.
However, it is probably correct to say that many a Muslim soon began to see the Europeans
in new light. This association of technical competence with the European person would lead
some Muslim thinkers of the nineteenth century to identify science and technology as we
now know it with Western Christianity.

European Colonization & Challenges to Muslim Ideas on Diversity

The European colonization of Muslim lands is the result of the
industrialization of Western Europe and the decline of Muslim power. Historians have
examined the manner in which European states gradually broke away from the pack of nations
in the world since the fifteenth century. We have discussed, in a previous section, the
Age of Discovery and the manner in which the establishment of new trading powers enhanced
the stocks of Europe and opened new doors of opportunities to them. In this section, I
intend to identify and discuss three issues that have affected Muslims in their
understanding of themselves and in their relationship with Europe. The first point relates
to the colonial experience and its impact on the psyche of the colonized Muslim. Frantz
Fanon and Albert Memmi both addressed the colonial question and the manner in which it
impacted North Africans. Fanon was a black man from Martinique whose colonial links to
France later led to his employment in a hospital in embattled Algeria under colonial rule.
Memmi grew up in North Africa as a colonial Jew. Both authors looked at the colonial
experience and how it affected the peoples of that part of the continent of Africa. What
makes Fanon particularly significant is his impact on Muslim thought, although he himself
was more secular than religious. His influence is indirect, and it comes by way of the
writings of Ali Shariati, one intellectual source of inspiration in the Iranian
revolution.

To return to Franz Fanon and his analysis of the colonial syndrome, let me
say that he identifies several characteristics of the colonial state. He argues quite
forcefully that the colonial powers created a Manichean world between the colonized and
the colonizer. To him, the colonial master dominates not only the physical space of the
colonized but his mental world as well. How does the imperial master carry out this policy
of political and cultural domination? Well, he does so by splitting the colonized society
into two camps, that is, the urban population and the rural communities. Through its
education system, the colonial power begins a socializing agency that gradually weans its
subjects away from their cultural heritage. This gallicization of the Muslim child creates
a world of ambiguity. A Senegalese novelist, Cheich Hamidou Kane, captures this perilous
state of cultural ambivalence in his widely celebrated book, Ambiguous Adventure.
As psychoanalyzed by Fanon and as fictionalized by Kane, the colonial education system
produces black Frenchmen in sub-Saharan Africa, Arab Frenchmen in North Africa and the
Middle East, and Southeast Asian Frenchmen in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This
replication of the French mind in the colonial territories led to the cultural alienation
of some elites, and what Myron Wiener called the "elite-mass gap" developed.
Such pathologies also created personalities such as Ferhat Abbas, the Algerian nationalist
leader, and Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the Malawian leader who rose to the presidency of his
country. What colonialism did to these two men is rob them of their native tongues. Both
of them developed such command of the colonial language that they "forgot" the
languages of their ancestors. Abbass case is the Muslim Arab example that applied
more fittingly to our study of cultural diversity in Muslim lands.

In looking into the colonial impact on the Muslim world, one must also
bear in mind how the colonial powers exploited the anthropological data about the
colonized peoples. In many Muslim lands where religious minorities existed, there were
attempts to pit such groups against the majority Muslim population. Even in areas where
the indirect rule policy of Lord Lugard was operational, such as in northern Nigeria,
there is still some limited evidence of divide-and-rule. Nigerian nationalists have always
argued that northern Nigerian Muslims were skillfully used by British colonial officers
against their Christian southern brethren. Real or imagined, the fact that postcolonial
Nigeria has continued to face serious political crisis testifies to the inherited colonial
legacy of the north/south divide. The same thing can be said about the problem of southern
Sudan. Though post colonial leaders of Sudan cannot run away from their responsibility in
the current state of affairs in that part of Africa, the fact remains that British
colonial interest shaped and directed the political outcome we now call Sudan. The
deliberate policy of effective separation of the peoples of the north and south in this
vast country planted the seeds of discord, and the post-colonial agitation of the southern
peoples is the belated manifestation of a long overdue outburst of political
dissatisfaction.

The Impact of Transplanted European Nationalist Ideas

The Muslims have established a record in world history in that their
religion introduced five major transformations in human life and culture. The first
revolutionary measure taken by the Muslims was to demolish the idols of the ancestors and
to uphold radical monotheism. Although Judaism can claim the pride of place in being the
first of the Abrahamic religions to challenge the hegemony of tribal deities among the
ancients and to advocate unflaggingly the primacy of one God, Yahweh, its claims to a
special covenantal dispensation with the Creator separates it from both Islam and
Christianity. Whereas the Hebrew people, that is, the children of Israel, usually see
themselves as the chosen people, the Muslims and Christians made more universal claims
that accommodate others not genetically linked to Abraham and his progeny. The second
revolutionary transformation of Islam was the teaching that all humanity derived from one
source of creation, Adam. This combination of the demolition of the idols of the tribes
and the advocacy of a common parentage in Adam and Eve for all humankind gave Islam a
distinct character among world religions. Such a philosophical position may seem
commonplace today among modern human beings who have been fed for some centuries now on
the steady diet of scientific empiricism which makes fun of the gods of yesteryears and
advances its own myth of origins for humanity.

Besides the radical monotheism of Islam and its advocacy of some
monogenesis, there are three other revolutionary transformations in human thought caused
by Islam. These changes are as follows: (a) the teaching that faith in a single Creator
(Allah) is the highest and most legitimate basis of allegiance for believing Muslims; (b)
that the basis of human distinction should not be the physical and external
characteristics of the person but his pity (taqwa); and (c) that power should not
be monopolized by any royal family but by caliphs given oaths of allegiance by their
Muslim peers. These teachings of Islam remained the guiding principles for many centuries
until the Muslim societies became increasingly dominated by the emergent European powers
in the nineteenth century.

Writing in the early 1960s, Bernard Lewis, a controversial academic whose
works enjoyed wide reading among Westerners, acknowledged the Islamic legacy to human
thought, with respect to its uncompromising stance against human fragmentation along
tribal and ethnic lines, when he wrote the following passage:

Every student of Islamic history knows the stirring story
of how Islam fought against idolatry, in the days of the Prophet and his Companions, and
triumphed, so that the worship of the one God replaced the many cults of pagan Arabia.
Another such struggle is being fought in our own timenot against Al-Lat and al-Uzza,
and the rest of old heathen pantheon, but against a new set of idols called states, races
and nations; this time it is the idols that seem to be victorious.
Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West, 1964.

Lewis, in pursuing this line of reasoning, later adds that the modern idea
of nationalism did not take root in Muslim lands, but that descent, language, and
habitation were all of secondary importance. He concludes his argument by saying that
"it is only during the last century that, under European influence, the idea of the
political union has begun to make headway. For Muslims, the basic division, the touchstone
by which men are separated from one another, by which one distinguished between brothers
and sisteris that of faith, of membership of a religious community."

But despite how Bernard Lewis feels about the viability of the
longstanding Islamic idea of ummatic solidarity in the modern period, the fact
remains that believing men and women in the Muslim world still embrace the idea and would
like to see its reification in the establishment of a global political order in which
Muslim solidarity is undisputed and Muslim cooperation again reaches the highest levels of
human possibilities. Yet, while acknowledging this fact, one cannot deny the penetration
of the nationalist ideas in the Muslim world. Over the last century and a half, the ideas
of European nationalism have crept into the imagination and consciousness of almost all
Muslim peoples. Two things have accounted for this turn of events. The first is the
colonization of Muslim lands, a phenomenon that is treated in the next section of this
paper. The second is the persistence of residual tribal and ethnic loyalties in Muslim
societies and the mining of these sentiments by pie-in-sky politicians and the idealistic
prophets of the new states in the Muslim world. As we will see later in this paper, the
expansion of European colonial rule led to the political manipulation and exploitation of
ethnic and religious minorities and majorities in areas where Muslim power was dominant
for centuries. This is clear in Africa, Asia, and in what was formerly the Soviet Empire.

In analyzing the impact of European nationalist thought in Muslim lands,
three other points deserve our attention. The first relates to the fact that, since the
modernization drive of the Ottoman [Empire], the nationalist idea has remained a
fascinating proposition to many a Muslim intellectual bent on imitating and hobnobbing
with the Westerners. The successes of the Young Turks and the establishment of the Turkish
Republic under Kemal Ataturk after the First World War have made it clear that nationalism
is here to stay for the time being. The Turkish example has been copied and followed
faithfully by the Arab states that came into being after the collapse of the colonial
empires in the Middle East and North Africa. The Iranians who did not suffer the
humiliation of colonization saw the nationalist path to self-definition a European
alternative to the Islamic paradigm. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the
Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis, the Indonesians, the Malaysians, and the Africans have all
decided unilaterally to follow the path of nation-building a la Europe. Again, with the
collapse of the Soviet colonial empire in central Asia, the newly liberated Muslim lands
have taken their seats as independent political entities in the United Nations and in the
Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). Their intellectuals have written sophisticated
pieces to justify their new political realities and to impress upon Doubting Thomases that
their political destiny is not guaranteed.

The second point that deserves our attention here is the fact that the
penetration of nationalist ideas from Europe has led to the polarization of Muslim lands
between the majority group and its minorities. The Turkish insistence that the Kurds of
that land accept the Turkish national language and the cultural victimization that
accompany such a nationalist policy is the mirror image of the enforced Bulgarization of
the Turkish minority in Bulgaria. Similarly, the victimization of the Kurds by the regime
of Saddam Hussein of Iraq and the denial of Kurdish aspirations for a separate nation in
the region have again created a state of unrest in both Turkey and Iraq. The situation is
not radically different in Iran, where the Kurdish minority has served as a political
football in the power game between the Iranian government and the leaders of Baghdad.

This prevalence of nationalist loyalties in the Muslim world has created a
serious rift between the loyalists to the old Muslim ideology of Pan Islamism, as Jamal
al-Afghani and his followers became known, and the secular nationalists who pedal their
political wares under the names of Arab nationalism, Baathism, Panchasila, Panafiricanism,
and many other isms. What unites all these varieties of nationalism in Muslim lands is
their recognition and acceptance of the European-imposed colonial boundaries. The
coagulation of the colonial boundaries has given new meanings and new realities to old
borders, and the emergence of social and economic classes with vested interest in the new
order has made it possible for the political elites to champion the new nationalism. The
Cold War that erupted soon after the defeat of the Nazis also helped in the cultivation of
the seeds of Third World nationalism. By recognizing the legitimacy of these states and by
wooing and winning them into their ideological orbits, the Cold War rivals in both the
East and the West gave credence to the leaders and the led of these Muslim countries.

The adoption of the nationalist ideology of the Europeans by the Muslim
states has created opportunities for ethnic leaders to pit one group against the others.
These opportunistic acts have been reported in almost all Muslim lands where cultural
pluralism and ethnic differentiation are either deeply rooted or have been rekindled by
the divide-and-rule tactics of the old colonial and imperial masters. Indeed, the ethnic
divisiveness is not peculiar to old colonial territories. The Afghan situation does not
only tell us that Islam was effective in ridding that land of communist rule, but it also
underscores the potential destruction old tribal and ethnic jealousies and rivalries could
bring into a Muslim country. The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the havoc wrought
by this brand of Islamism has made it categorically clear that Islam could be used as
"a wallpaper to cover the cracks in the wall of Pushto nationalism." The same
problem could derail the developmental efforts of Malaysia and Indonesia in Southeast Asia
and of those of the predominantly Muslim states of sub-Saharan Africa.

The Impact of the Rise of Communism

Islam has gotten the distinction of being the most consistently opposed to
both polytheism and atheism. Except the central Asian Muslim territories and the Muslims
of Bosnia and Albania, no other Muslim lands lived under communist rule until the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. This bold gamble of the Soviet leadership was destined to trigger
the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this section of the paper, we intend to explore the
encounter between the communist message and the Muslim peoples. We also wish to study the
manner in which this body of ideas affected Muslim thought on cultural diversity.

There are three ways in which communism affected the Muslim lands. The
first and most significant was the political poisoning of the Middle Eastern climate. This
is to say, the dissemination of communist ideas in the Middle East, especially after the
Second World War, injected the Cold War into an Arab world that was just coming out of the
colonial experience. By competing with the Western powers who had a vested interest in
capitalism and by recruiting young Muslims from this region of the world and beyond, the
communists planted suspicion among the peoples of the region. Whereas in the past
non-Muslims could exist side by side with Muslims, the prospects of a communist takeover
of the state and society in the post-colonial era made the communist members of society
political lepers who deserved long jail sentences or physical elimination. This state of
affairs was fostered by the Western allies of the Muslim anticommunist forces. The
political history of the Middle East could be explained in many ways. One interpretation
that begs for attention is the argument that the Cold War polarized the Arabs between the
radical nationalists who embraced some form of Arab socialism and those who flirted with
capitalist powers. The late Professor Malcolm Kerr, the assassinated president of American
University of Beirut, called the Arab Cold War the offspring of the rivalry between the
Soviet Union and the United States. From the perspective of Muslim cultural history, one
could argue that the two cold wars, one regional and the other global, were detrimental to
the self-definition of the Arab states and the pursuit of their individual and collective
interest.

The second issue to explore here is the impact of the Cold War on the
internal affairs of Muslim lands. In the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia,
the communist parties were dominated by members of the ethnic minorities. In the Arab
world, Jews, Greeks, and Armenians have generally been identified with such parties,
although many ethnic Arabs also embraced some form of Marxism. What this ethnification of
Marxism meant for these Muslim lands was the creation of a wall of suspicion between the
members of these ethnically based communist parties and the majority communities. By
creating such an unhealthy climate of suspicion, the rights and privileges previously
accorded to such peoples by Islam and traditions were gradually or immediately taken away
from them, not in the name of Islam but in the name of state security. The spirit of the
Cold War made this kind of policy and practice acceptable and legitimate. It also gave
greater power and respectability to the secular state and its operators.

Besides these two issues, there is the third issue, which addresses the
case of Muslim leaders who flirted with Marxism in its early days after the end of the
First World War. We are told by historians of the period that some Muslim leaders who
wanted to liberate their societies from the yoke of foreign rule briefly flirted with the
idea of working with the communists. Two examples can be cited here. The first was Enver
Pasha, who had in 1918 launched the "Army of Islam," ostensibly to help liberate
the Muslims from the Russian Empire. After the communists came to power, this Turkish
Muslim settled in Moscow that had by then emerged as the new center of anti-imperialism.
In 1921, he presided over a Congress of the Union of Islamic Revolutionary Societies in
Berlin and Rome. This attempt at revolutionary Islam failed. Enver Pasha, who was sent to
Central Asia to help the newly installed communist regime, changed sides and became a part
of the Muslim nationalist campaign against Russian rule. He was killed in 1922 fighting
the Red Army. Another example is the case of Sultan Galiev, the Tartar schoolmaster who
worked with Stalin at the Commissariat of Nationalities in 1918 and conceived the idea of
revolutionary international colonial peoples independent of the Comintern. He was arrested
in 1923 for "nationalist deviations" and disappeared in a later purge (Lewis, op.cit.).

The Impact of the Iranian Revolution

The eruption of the Iranian Revolution, and the manner in which it changed
the course of world history, has received the attention of many authors. Not much,
however, has been written on the impact of the Revolution on Muslim thought on cultural
diversity. In the following pages, we examine the impact of the revolution and the manner
in which Muslims and non-Muslims have come to view the changes resulting from this
redirection of Western support. The other development was the new phenomenon of
"re-ethnification of the Arab-Iranian relations." By re-ethnification I mean the
propagandistic misuse of the Battle of Qadisiyah by President Saddam Hussein and his
Baathist collaborators in the Arab world. Sensing the potentials of the Iran Revolution as
a source of inspiration and subversion in the Muslim world, and determined to join forces
with any and every powerful group to contain this threat, the Iraqi and Gulf states found
in Sunnism a new weapon to bash the Iranian revolutionaries. This strategy of the Arab
supporters of the Iraqis again drove a wedge between Shiites and Sunnis. Soon the bridges
constructed by the earlier euphoria about the Iranian Revolution began to crumble into the
sea of charges and countercharges.

The third point focuses on the revolution and the treatment of local
minorities. Under the Shah, the religious minorities fared well. This was particularly
true for the Bahá'ís. Many Iranians would now concede that the Shah was very generous to
the Bahá'ís. This act of generosity was sometimes seen negatively by Muslim Iranians who
saw the invisible hand of the Bahá'ís in virtually every major event in their country. This
resentment of the Bahá'ís, which goes back to the rise of this new religion in Iran in the
last century, affected the Muslim view of cultural diversity. The Bahá'ís were treated by
the Shahs regime as just one community out of many seeking religious space in Iran.
Under the Shahs modernization program, the Bahá'ís and the Muslim majority were
supposed to live under one political roof. Iranian law was supposed to accord equal
treatment to all and sundry.

The Iranian Revolution changed the whole political and religious equation
for the Bahá'ís. Seen as heretical by the Islamic revolutionaries and branded as
collaborators with the external enemy, the Bahá'ís were dismissed as unfit to receive the
kind of treatment given to ahl al-kitab (People of the Book). Since their leader
was a renegade Muslim who claimed to be the Messiah and the Mahdi simultaneously, the new
religious leadership in Iran changed their lot by rearranging the rights and privileges of
citizens living under the Islamic Republic. Contrary to the claims by Bahá'ís in the United
States of America, the Bahá'ís in Iran are not totally disenfranchised. However, one should
hasten to add that their lives are not as secured as in the days of the Shah.

Again, when we look at the impact of the Iranian Revolution on Muslim
thought on cultural diversity, one quickly realizes that the success of the revolution has
created new opportunities for religious entrepreneurs to pit one sect against the other.
This polarization process has reached dangerous proportions in the subcontinent,
especially in Pakistan, where newspapers report daily killings. Sunnis and Shiites now
hunt each other as fair game. This act of terror has now threatened not only the future of
the Pakistani state but the unity of the Pakistani people. The glue that kept the
Pakistanis united for the last fifty years is being eroded by the resurgence of sectarian
and ethnic allegiances. A review of Pakistani history shows that the leaders of the Muslim
League were drawn from various sects of Islam. The first leader of Pakistan was a Muslim
but from the Ismaili subgroup. A Qadiani served as Foreign Minister in the early days of
Pakistan without much opposition from the majority Sunni and Shiite Muslims of Pakistan.
Since the Iranian Revolution and the rise of protagonists and antagonists of the
revolution, Muslim societies such as Pakistan and Lebanon have seen new forces and new
faces in the circle of leadership in their countries. These groups, one can assert, have
come up with their own interpretations of the Muslim experience and are now opposed to one
another in the name of Islam. This extremist interpretation of Islam and its heritage in
the Middle East has become most violent and most deadly in the hands of the new Taliban
government in Afghanistan.

Conclusions

In concluding this study, we must summarize the major points developed in
the body of this paper. [Many] conclusions can be made from the arguments and points
raised throughout this text. The first conclusion is that the original Muslim formulation
on the nature of human identity has undergone transformations not only because of the
lapses in Muslim judgements and behavior but also in the Muslim attempts at emulating
other cultural forms and patterns developing around the globe. The second conclusion is
that the age known to European historians as the Age of Discovery created the
psychological and political climate that violated the rights of the native peoples of the
world. The third conclusion is that the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century
presented, and has continued to present, humanity with new and unforeseeable challenges
that have either crippled the defenders of religion or have rearranged their ways of life
to such a degree that the idols of the market have now replaced the old idols of the gods.
The fourth conclusion is that the colonization of the world by peoples of European descent
has changed radically the human view of physical space and the philosophy of ownership.
The Lockean notion of ownership by simply mixing ones labor with the soil has
replaced if not displaced the old communal views of property ownership. The fifth
conclusion is that the expansion of Europe into the Americas and beyond has led to the
conflation of color, creed, and culture into one metaphysical category. The genocidal
liquidation of the native peoples of the Americas and Australia has affected the Muslims
and others who were not part of the Judeo-Christian World. The sixth conclusion is that
the rise of European nationalism has affected Muslim lands and peoples to such an extent
that they too are bitten by the bug of territorial nationalism, and that the fratricidal
wars that have erupted across their borders over the last decades are living proofs of the
dangerousness of demotic or territorial nationalism. The seventh conclusion of this study
is that the ideological contest between the communist movement and the capitalist world
created conditions and circumstances that militated against any independent Muslim
exercise of critical self-definition. What is being suggested here is that the Cold War
distorted Muslim sentiments and polarized Muslims as they offered their friendship with
one or the other of the two Superpowers. The eighth conclusion is that the rise of the
Iranian Revolution opened the floodgates of Muslim solidarity for a brief period after the
1979 historic event. Related to this conclusion is the point that the Iran-Iraq War
solidified the wall of sectarian separation that tumbled following the overthrow of the
Shah. The ninth conclusion is that the Muslim world has new challenges and opportunities
to deal with in the realm of cultural anthropology and political anthropology of its
societies. Its ability to do better in the next century will depend greatly on the vision
of its leaders and on the reformulation of its philosophy of group relations within the
historical framework of Islam.